families, and to add wealth to wealth. It may be that it does
so. It is impossible that any principle of law or government useful to
the community should be established without an advantage to those who
have the greatest stake in the country. Even some vices arise from it.
The same laws which secure property encourage avarice; and the fences
made about honest acquisition are the strong bars which secure the
hoards of the miser. The dignities of magistracy are encouragements to
ambition, with all the black train of villanies which attend that wicked
passion. But still we must have laws to secure property, and still we
must have ranks and distinctions and magistracy in the state,
notwithstanding their manifest tendency to encourage avarice and
ambition.

By affirming the parental authority throughout the state, parents in
high rank will generally aim at, and will sometimes have the means, too,
of preserving their minor children from any but wealthy or splendid
matches. But this authority preserves from a thousand misfortunes which
embitter every part of every man's domestic life, and tear to pieces the
dearest lies in human society.

I am no peer, nor like to be,--but am in middle life, in the mass of
citizens; yet I should feel for a son who married a prostituted woman,
or a daughter who married a dishonorable and prostituted man, as much as
any peer in the realm.

You are afraid of the avaricious principle of fathers. But observe that
the avaricious principle is here mitigated very considerably. It is
avarice by proxy; it is avarice not working by itself or for itself, but
through the medium of parental affection, meaning to procure good to its
offspring. But the contest is not between love and avarice.

While you would guard against the possible operation of this species of
benevolent avarice, the avarice of the father, you let loose another
species of avarice,--that of the fortune-hunter, unmitigated,
unqualified. To show the motives, who has heard of a man running away
with a woman not worth sixpence? Do not call this by the name of the
sweet and best passion,--love. It is robbery,--not a jot better than any
other.

Would you suffer the sworn enemy of his family, his life, and his
honor, possibly the shame and scandal and blot of human society, to
debauch from his care and protection the dearest pledge that he has on
earth, the sole comfort of his declining years, almost in infantine
imbecility,--and with it t